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07 August 2014

Here's how Douglas Murray (if you've not heard of him, he's just some dude who has opinions on Muslims for money) manages to make a politician sound like a 50ft bionic Osama Bin Laden, for having taken a principled stand he didn't approve of, without ever actually saying anything that is untrue.

Farewell then Sayeeda, Baroness Warsi. The most over-promoted, incapable and incompetent minister of recent times has finally done the nation one service and resigned.

This is basically just opinion, but I've a sneaking suspicion he deliberately included "over-promoted" so he didn't have to give the incapable and incompetent award to the former Minister for Education.

This morning she announced on Twitter that she can ‘no longer support government policy on Gaza.’ That would be government policy that now includes reviewing all arms export licenses to Israel? Not strong enough for Sayeeda, it would seem.

The 'all' is there to make it seem like a really big policy decision rather than just a "review".

It was not hard to see this coming. Not just because Warsi’s Twitter activity in recent weeks has mainly consisted of pumping out support for Hamas-run Gaza

Douglas's first big non-lie. If you call it "Hamas-run Gaza" you don't just get to make support for Gaza (a bit of land with actual human beings living on it) sound like support for Hamas, you actually get to include the phrase "support for Hamas", in case anyone is only half-reading the article to have their existing opinions massaged and worries that they might be wrong dismissed (this is the purpose of the Spectator).

and berating supporters of Israel for saying things she disagrees with,

Long-winded synonym for 'arguing with'.

but also because she has shown a career-long sympathy for Hamas and other Islamic radicals.
In 2006, on an ‘Any Questions’ on BBC Radio 4, Warsi welcomed the election of Hamas in Gaza.

I wonder what she could possibly have said.

This was after the group had killed hundreds of Israelis in suicide bomb attacks. Apparently unable to imagine that Hamas governing Gaza might be a problem, she said:
‘I think what’s happened in the Middle East with the election of Hamas is actually an opportunity and I think that’s the way we’ve got to see it. When groups that practice violence are suddenly propelled into power through a democratic process they get responsibility and responsibility can be a tremendously taming factor.’

Turns out this was the kind of support for terrorism where you're happy that engagement in democratic processes might make them calm down and start doing less terrorism.

Well, how wrong she was. Hamas used the opportunity of their poll ‘mandate’ to kill their Palestinian Fatah opponents in Gaza, stage a military coup and never hold another election. They then spent the money sent from abroad in aid of the Palestinian people to arm themselves with weapons to fire at Israel and to construct tunnel complexes to carry out terrorist attacks in Israel on Jewish holy days.
But Warsi’s ‘soft’ line on Hamas was just part of the broader picture.

I'm not sure who said "soft" but it seems here to mean "made what Douglas Murray considers to be an overly optimistic prediction regarding". You'll also note that the violence he describes after Hamas was elected is a lot less than the hundreds killed in suicide bombings before.

As the Times newspaper reported, back in 2006, in an article for the Asian newspaper Awaaz (written while she was vice-chairman of the Conservative Party) Warsi described the then Labour Government’s anti-terror proposals as ‘enough to tip any normal young man into the realms of a radicalized fanatic.’

Not only did she as a member of the opposition, oppose government anti-terror legislation, a thing Douglas Murray likes, she also opposed the war in Iraq.

And she wrote that ‘if terrorism is the use of violence against civilians, then where does that leave us in Iraq?’ In 2007 I discovered where she thought that left us. During a rather heated and angryQuestion Time, just after two car bombs had been placed outside a London nightclub on lady’s night, we got onto Iraq.

Here Douglas Murray makes condemning terrorism sound like approving of terrorism. He also doesn't specify who got heated and angry, but I bet it was the Muslim, you know what they're like. I'm also not sure how they got onto Iraq, but what probably happened was, after the question on the two car bombs was finished, they moved onto another question (the structure of Question Time involves several questions, one after the other). It sounds here like the discussion was cynically derailed.

I repeatedly asked Warsi to condemn the killing of British troops in Iraq. She repeatedly refused to do so. I don’t think I’ve ever had more emails from servicemen and women and their families, asking how it could be that a Conservative (then shadow) minister would not condemn the killing of British troops while they were on active service.

Douglas Murray, a man who gets angry with Muslims for opposing the killing of civilians, also gets angry when they don't condemn soldiers being killed on active service. This is because Douglas Murray literally doesn't know what soldiers are or what a war is and wants people to condemn the fighting you occasionally get on battlefields.

Warsi’s track-record of dubious support goes on. For instance, she expressed support for Kashmiri terrorist groups who she described as engaged in freedom fighting.

He doesn't have to quote this bit for some reason, which probably means it wasn't very shocking, and odds on began "one man's terrorist is another man's…"

And all the time she got away with it because she held herself out as the voice of the Muslims, and in particular of the ‘middle ground’. In fact she simply created this image by attacking people who almost anybody from the Muslim communities can attack — Anjem Choudary, al-Muhajiroun etc.

This is the bit where he concedes she condemns extremism without actually having to concede anything.

But her interests were clearly not in trying to move opinion in a genuinely constructive direction. Increasingly as ‘minister of faith’ she used her position not to tackle the extremists who she should have been tackling but to persuade the UK government that it should make ‘a priority’ of tackling ‘Islamophobia’.

Editorial point: stylistically speaking any prejudice you hold yourself should be placed in quotation marks.

Her priorities remained skewed. When, earlier this year, she tried to put together a panel at the Foreign Office looking into ‘Religious Freedom’ (fine subject though this is at a time when Christians are being massacred and religiously ‘cleansed’ across two continents)

This is not a thing Warsi was actually involved in, I should point out. Douglas Murray cleverly agrees with the aims of the panel, while making it sound like the panel is opposed to them.

those she invited to join it included the Muslim Brotherhood dauphin Tariq Ramadan.

You may not know the word 'dauphin'. It's French for 'prince', specifically the heir apparent. It has a double meaning, since it sounds very important and powerful, but it also means the son of the king. While university lecturer Tariq Ramadan is not himself in the Muslim Brotherhood and holds no kind of office in the organisation, his father was at one point a prominent figure. You also get to include the phrase "included the Muslim Brotherhood".

Her time in government was filled with disasters. She repeatedly narrowly avoided being sacked. Her car-crashes mostly came over her attempts to develop what was effectively a parallel set of policies to those of the British government of which she was meant to be part. Word was that she had become increasingly angry after various reshuffles in which it became plain that she would never be given a ministry.

It's rare that you get to call a senior Tory catastrophically inept in the Spectator so I'll let Douglas enjoy it.

She doubtless concocted in her mind various conspiracies as to why this might be

We have no way of knowing if this is the case, but Douglas Murray is not a man to ever doubt his own speculation.

but the reason was single and obvious: she did not have the ability.
Realising that this ambition was to be thwarted, she manoeuvred to turn her position in Cabinet into one which was somehow meant to ‘represent’ Muslims. Purest, as well as dangerous nonsense. Everybody in Cabinet is there to represent everybody in Britain.

Here Douglas stops taking about a politician giving extra focus to one section of the electorate, and starts talking as if she was exclusively representing that group. Rumour has it Douglas Murray is also extremely angry about ministers trying to represent pensioners or small business owners but his editor won't accept the pitch.

But Warsi encouraged sectarianism rather than diminishing it. And where she could have used her position to side-line the extremists within Britain’s Muslim communities, she spent more of her time trying to stop people criticising the extremists within Britain’s Muslim communities. She was a notable behind-the-scenes critic of genuine Muslim reformers, in particular.

Behind-the-scenes criticism is the best sort of criticism for this article because nobody will ever expect you to say who or what she was criticising for what or in what words. For a translation of "trying to stop people criticising the extremists", see earlier translations of "berating…disagreeing" and the above stylistic guidelines regarding "Islamophobia".

Warsi’s time in government set back the fight to detach the extremists from the majority, and repeatedly blurred the lines around extremism.

This is a very vague in terms of what the fuck she actually did, but it does contain two variants on the word 'extremist' so you get as much of the picture as you need to have an opinion.

She was promoted by David Cameron because of her sex and religious identity. Her fast-tracking into the Lords, Shadow Cabinet and then the Cabinet was identity politics at its most cynical and — in the end — counterproductive.

'Identity politics', here, refers to the inclusion of peers, rather than MPs in a cabinet, and the offering of peerages to figures the government wishes to include in politics, two otherwise unheard of practices.

David Cameron wanted to promote a Muslim woman, grabbed the first one he could see, and promoted her. She turned out to be a bad one.

Well if you will pick a fucking Tory…

The only good thing is that, were David Cameron at all tempted to repeat this reach-out today he would find that there are actually talented, capable and inspiring minority ethnic candidates in his parliamentary party and elsewhere. Perhaps he will have learnt his lesson, in which case we might be able to declare the age of identity politics — epitomised by Sayeeda Warsi — as very happily over.

Remember, "identity politics" rarely means anything beyond "I am a white man angry about race and/or gender issues but don't really know why", and of course we'll all be glad when this age is over.

22 April 2014

MYTH: Atheist men are forced by their faith to wear the Fedora.FACT: False. The Fedora is not, and has never been inherent to the Atheist religion. It is in fact a local cultural practice, thought to originate in the Reddit region of the Internet, which has spread widely among adherents of the faith. Not all male Atheists wear the Fedora, while many who do have freely chosen to wear it and do not consider it at all degrading.MYTH: Women are subjugated and considered inferior by the doctrines of Atheism.FACT: Partly true. While hardline Atheists do have traditional, often hateful attitudes to women, there are some progressive sects within the faith, such as AtheismPlus, which fight to change this. Needless to say, these brave moderates and reformers frequently find themselves subjected to harassment and violent threats by the hardliners and traditionalists, but there are signs of change!

MYTH: Atheism is a racist ideology.FACT: False. Atheists are forbidden to even see colour, and are commanded to identify and drive out The Real Racist wherever he should be found.

MYTH: Atheism is a religion of peace.FACT: False. While there are peaceful Atheists, for every moderate there is a Sam Harris or Christopher Hitchens ready to justify the harassment, torture, murder and even mass-genocide of non-Atheists at home and abroad. In conclusion, Atheism is diverse and mixed, but there are some Atheists who do not advocate violence or terror.

MYTH: Atheism is not a religion, for it has no beliefs or dogma.FACT: False. This is a common belief among Atheists, and rests on a different understanding of the terms. Whereas, in Atheist theology, 'belief' refers to the beliefs of other religions, the unquestioned and unsubstantiated beliefs of Atheism - such as "Islam is not a race" - are referred to within Atheism as 'facts'. It is not objectively incorrect to call Atheism a 'religion', however to do so conflicts with Atheists' own understanding of their faith, and for this reason they consider the term offensive.MYTH: Atheists worship the Dictionary.FACT: False. Atheists are actually forbidden to worship anything, even the Dictionary. Many Atheists do not even believe the Dictionary to be infallible! However, Atheists do see the Dictionary as a source of absolute, incontrovertible Truth. Atheists believe apocalyptic prophecies regarding the fate of the world should the Dictionary ever be questioned or abandoned - namely that "language would lose all meaning" and "a word could mean literally anything". For this reason they are often afraid to deviate from its teachings.

MYTH: Atheist Dogma considers Richard Dawkins to be divine and his statements to be infallible, much like the role of the Pope in Catholicism.FACT: False. While Atheists do not always believe Richard Dawkins cannot be wrong, it is an official dogma of Atheism that Richard Dawkins cannot be racist.

MYTH: Atheism is a Millenarian or Messianic movement, anticipating an "end to religion" and a final "age of reason".FACT: False. Atheists often believe the coming Age of Reason to be the final culmination of human history. However, while Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett are frequently referred to as "horsemen of the apocalypse" in Atheist mythology, the vast majority of Atheists choose to interpret this as a metaphor.

MYTH: Atheists practice a catechism, and must through questioning establish if all earthly things are or are not a race.FACT: Partly true. Certainly Atheism is characterised by a spirit of curiosity and enquiry and an emphasis on learning for its own sake - as such it is comparable to Islam or particularly Judaism. However the catechistic practice of questioning is neither a method of enquiry or meditation, nor a declaration or test of faith. It is in fact a protective charm invoked when the central dogma of Atheism is questioned by an outsider.

MYTH: The central belief of Atheism is that "Islam is not a race".FACT: False. While the majority of Atheists do believe "Islam is not a race", and are more vocal in their declarations than with any other article of faith, this, along with "a religion is not a race", and "it is not racist to criticise a religion" is derived from the central dogma of Atheism, namely: "Something you can convert to is not a race. A statement of simple fact is not bigotry."

MYTH: It is forbidden for an Atheist man to enter an elevator.FACT: False. The official doctrines of Atheism say nothing about stairs or elevators. However, traditional Atheist folklore frequently invokes a malevolent trickster-goddess known as Rebecca Watson, said to use an elevator to ensnare and humiliate Atheist men. Many Atheist men are thus afraid to enter elevators, and should thus be treated with sensitivity and respect.

MYTH: Atheism is nothing more than non-belief in god(s); indeed, the term should not even exist.FACT: Partly true. While Atheists consider "non-belief in god(s)" to be the defining quality of their religion (distinct, in Atheist theology, from the belief that there is no god), for many, Atheism and the beliefs associated with it are a defining part of their personal identity, often prioritised above all others. For this reason a certain amount of sensitivity is necessary when criticising Atheism.

16 January 2014

How, you ask, could I be so crass as to talk about "cultural imperialism" or "imposing Western values" when mass underage Hamas child weddings are taking place RIGHT NOW* in the Gaza Strip?
(*2009. I blog slowly)

But it's time we rethink one major aspect of our Euro-American/Christian sensibilities, cultural suppositions and traditional practices, a highly prevalent taboo that most of us take as read:

In the West we have ingrained cultural beliefs that:

The bride at a wedding wears a white dress

The bridesmaids and wedding guests should not upstage the bride

The bridesmaids and wedding guests should especially not wear a white bridal dress

It's really embarrassing if two or more people at a party wear the same clothes

Even ignoring their weird, racist beliefs about Islam and paedophilia, a bunch of slow-witted Europeans and Americans imposed their cultural assumption that The Person in the White Dress Is the Bride, looked at somebody's wedding photo, and, believing their own local values to be universal, decided it was full of child brides.

04 January 2014

I'm going to start by saying something controversial: I think Stephen Moffat is a pretty good TV writer. There might be certain flaws in his characterisations. He might be pathologically incapable of making anyone actually properly die. But as a writer he has an impressive talent for messy, complicated situations, where all the loose ends neatly knot together at the end in a fun surprise. So, he's not only come up with two of the scariestmonsters in Doctor Who - not just scary-looking but conceptually terrifying - but, by the end of the episode/double bill, the main, terrifying aspect of them has been used to defeat them. Coupling had its spectacularly fuckawful moments and got entirely unwatchable after two serieses, but the two funniest episodes ('Sex, Death and Nudity' and 'The Girl With Two Breasts') were funny because they did this tying together thing very, very well. And obviously this is a useful talent for 1. Programmes about bizarrely incomprehensible time-travel and 2. complex whodunits. He also does a lot of quite good self-referential running gags and one-liners.

But the main reason I found his Doctor Who refreshing was that I hate heroes. I was sick of Russell T. Davies's dashing, handsome, heroic heroes, swaggering round being dashing, handsome and heroic. David Tennant being all cool, Captain Jack with his chin drawn with a set-square, the swishing fucking trenchcoats of it all. It was refreshing to see Matt Smith and Stephen Moffat turn Doctor Who into a madman with a box, an exciteable idiot on holiday. An exciteable idiot with terrible dress sense in a stupid tie and a hat nobody likes. Sherlock, too, is funny because, as well as being an affectionate parody, it plays up what an obnoxious, insensitive, arrogant little dickweasel Sherlock Holmes really is.

Trouble is, Moffat has his own set of problems with heroes. By the end, Number Eleven is swaggering around, swinging a prop in fiery silhouette, as heroic-saga narration explains how much buns he kicked. Genuinely intelligent people are acting as if bowties and fezzes actually are cool, rather than this being the opinion of a badly dressed box-madman. We've got the same insufferable hero worship we got with David Tennant, but with a novelty geek theme. More importantly though, almost all Moffat's major characters and antagonists tend to have the hero as their main or only motive.

Take Moriarty for example. In 'The Final Problem', when Conan Doyle introduces him, he'd barely been aware of Sherlock Holmes, and for a long time completely unaware that Sherlock Holmes had heard of him. Sherlock Holmes needed this to win. In the meantime, Moriarty had a whole crime empire to run rather than pissing about trolling amateur sleuths. In BBC Sherlock though, he's the mastermind behind five of the six episodes in the first two series, specifically targetting and toying with Sherlock Holmes in at least three of them. I wouldn't be surprised to see his ghost surface in Series 3 either. Rather than Sherlock giving up his life pursuing Moriarty, Moriarty devotes his entire existence to pursuing Holmes, seemingly just for the fun of it.

At the climax of each Moffat series, it turns out most of the episodes have been building up to a big conspiracy. As likely as not, all the monsters in the galaxy have turned up in their spaceships and are waiting for him. Maybe they want to put him in a big box, maybe they've stolen a baby and they want it to kill him and he cheated, maybe Withnail has been listening to their prophecies and lured him to his own grave to sneak inside his life. But whatever it was, every Moffat series has a conspiracy against Doctor Who. And then, in this year's Christmas special, it turns out that all those conspiracies - the exploding Tardis that made everyone want to put him in a box, the stolen assassin-baby, the weird Trenzalore knock-knock joke adaptation - were all part of the same conspiracy. An entire version of Doctor Who - and Moffat's entire session as showrunner so far - has been driven by the same conspiracy just to get one bloke. Even the Daleks - who have thousands upon thousands of other sentient races to destroy - put ludicrous amounts of time and energy into chasing round one idiot in a stupid hat.

You also see this with Irene Adler. Now what I will say for Moffat's Adler is she gets a massive upgrade from the books. She goes from a small-time blackmailer who he tricks and exposes, but who outwits him enough to give him the slip and escape with her dignity, to having a ninety-minute intellectual duel with him. But her motives have to change. She's no longer an ordinary musician trying to sneak away with an incriminating photo of her high-profile lover, she's a fangirl who wants to play with him. Maybe she wants to bone him, maybe she wants to play detective powerplay brain-chess with him, maybe she wants to play detective powerplay brain-chess with him as a kind of substitute boning, but either way, her motive is Sherlock. This, it turns out in the end, is her undoing (though if you count it up she might still win on aggregate).

Then we see Doctor Who's lady friends. In and of themselves, I'd say the Female Companion is quite a good way to do it. Yeah, it's quite creepy, even more so after it we got rid of the eccentric uncles and brought in cool handsome young Doctors the companions almost always end up fancying. But the character the audience identifies with, the character whose eyes we're supposed to look through while we try and make sense of this enigmatic, irrational character and his mysterious whims and thoughts, is invariably a woman. It's at least a neat, believable gender-swap of a lot of very old clichés. River Song too, is a brilliant idea for a character, especially since she's seen it all already and runs rings round her husband - though obviously as the story arc goes on the roles get reversed. The problem is, not only do Amy Pond, River Song and Clara Oswald end up becoming mysteries Doctor Who has to solve, the answer is always the same thing: Because of Doctor Who. River is an assassin made to kill him. Amy is her mother. Clara is a succession of variants of herself sent to get him out of sticky situations. Only Amy is introduced as someone who was just getting on with her life before he clattered in and turned everything upside-down, and even that ends up with some odd 26th-June-2010 magic behind it. Then in turn, Rory has the same relationship to her: a plot-device to service a plot-device.

One major thing I like about Doctor Who is his way of saving the day, not after seeing some sort of horrible-bowtie bat-signal and running in, but after blundering accidentally into situations that are already going on. Here, the Weeping Angels are sort of Moffat's saving grace: since they don't have any agenda besides eating time or whatever, he can just stumble in - though even with 'Blink' their initial motive is to get their hands on his delicious Tardis. Sherlock Holmes is the same - he sits around smoking, taking cocaine and playing the violin until someone rings his doorbell with some petty crime that intrigues him. Moffat can't do this. Moffat can do flawed, idiotic, bumbling, arrogant, prickish, quasi-genocidal, actually-slightly-embarrassing heroes, but he can't do heroes who are just there. He can't do heroes who the surrounding characters are indifferent to, or have lives independent of, or would be getting on fine with their galactic crime empires if it wasn't for these meddling nerds. He can't even do heroes without every woman in the show wanting to bone them - at least Captain Jack's square-jawed pan-sexy stud act was funny rather than dim background hum.

Initially this was clever. The Doctor had spent ten, if not twelve, incarnations going round bollocksing up various alien empires' dastardly plans, so it's not surprising a few might be out to get him. Tardises probably are really powerful and desirable. The unwanted fame and cult status and fan speculation become a really good running gag in Sherlock. The "question as old as time itself", broadcast throughout time and space, is quite a smart nod to the "Doctor who?" thing being a really, really old joke, if not a funny nod to it. For all the characters to be basically caused by the hero, for their lives revolve entirely round some galaxy-trotting idiot in a box, can work in small doses. Even Moffat has made it work very well at times. But you need very, very careful gender politics to pull that off, and, well:

16 December 2013

Original Lyrics:
And if you want beef, then bring the ruckus /
Wu-Tang Clan ain’t nuttin ta fuck wit

Hey, you know that joke where you take something you wouldn’t normally associate with really stilted, overly formal Standard English, say, for example, a genre of music mostly made by black people, and instead of leaving it as it is, you say it in really stilted, overly formal Standard English, and that’s funny, and also makes you feel quite clever and sophisticated for laughing at it without being outright unironic snobbery?

Are you bothered if substituting in long, high-register words and Queen’s English comes at the expense of any actual eloquence, wordplay or poetic skill there was in the original version?

And would you mind if it eventually degenerated into just saying what you think they should have said, because you find it easier to challenge other social groups’ outright misogyny than your own pretend-friendly, pedestal-building iRespectFemales misogyny?

By adding 'sausage and' to the beginning, not only does the phrase become humorously unwieldy, we also now have the name of a meal which, it is easy to imagine, could be dispensed and withdrawn through such a machine.

The similarity between 'mash' and 'cash' and between 'food banks' and 'banks' as in the financial institution can be combined, with amusingly absurd implications. (This, notably, recalls the 'Jobs, Hope, Cash' hypothesis of recent years.)

Since the connection between signifier and signified is arbitrary, it is absurd and incongruent (and therefore pleasantly amusing) to imagine that similarity in the sounds of the two words can result in any similarity in meaning, even if - as in this case - two sets of phonological similarities seem to match up.

But in most jokes, the interesting part is not the punchline but the feed-line. In setting up the absurd and illogical punchline, the feed-line often needs to be based on either obvious or indisputable truths or, failing that, things the listener assumes to be true. This is not the joke. This is not the bit we're meant to laugh at. This is the bit we're meant to gloss over and assume is true so we're ready for the silly absurd bit we're about to hear.

So my question is, why the fuck is there a fat guy at a food bank?

There are two ways this cartoon could have panned out. Either way, to draw someone withdrawing from the mashpoint the cartoonist had to ask themselves "what sort of person uses a food bank?" and the two main criteria, obviously, are:

Poor

Hungry

I don't think this is a particular controversial statement. But since it's hard to show a person's bank balance and the contents of their stomach in one line drawing that's mostly about mashed potato, you need to use symbolism. The second quickest way to do it is:

Stereotypical dolechav (working and/or shirking-class, conveyed efficiently through the clothes in the picture)

Greedy person who eats a lot of food (and must therefore always be hungry)

Both of these point to 'fat'. Weirdly though, the first quickest way to symbolise poor and hungry is a thin person, since

Poor people often do not get enough to eat - and these tend to be the ones who need food banks.

Insufficient calorie intake can, and often does cause weight loss and thinness.

The problems with this shorter, more realistic version are, however:

It's less funny, as fewer people enjoy laughing at thin people than enjoy laughing fat people.

It fits less with the target audience's (Spectator readers) imagination and assumptions about who uses food banks, and their aesthetic objections to certain types of people.

It makes food bank users seem unhappy and sympathetic, rather than fat and round and funny and well-fed, and therefore makes food banks a sad indicator of the economic conditions of poor people, rather than a pleasantly diverting play on words.

Now, either the cartoonist never considered that a food bank user might be thin/average-sized and poor instead of fat and greedy, or at some point an editorial decision was made, and either a real editor or, more likely, a hypothetical editor in the cartoonist's head said "no, don't draw him thin, draw him fat, for the reasons listed above".

The reason the food bank man is fat and happy is because the cartoon is not meant to resonate with any kind of actual objective reality, but with the imaginations of Spectator readers. Now, we all know that know the Spectator isn't there to provide people with facts but to give them that warm, fuzzy feeling you get when you know James Delingpole and Rod Liddle share all the idiotic prejudices you were a bit anxious might be wrong. We also know that, as a demographic, these people are worthless turdscum unworthy of even a short break from being hit in the balls with a crowbar. But today we learn what their problem with poverty is - firstly, it leads to people who aren't them getting free things, and secondly, it causes unsightly fat people.

06 August 2013

I wrote this around the time the Nice Guys of OKCupid tumblr was taken down, largely because a stake through the heart doesn't really work on websites. Part of my motivation is I'm personally invested in this. I've never thought the "Nice Guy" thing was anything but bollocks and would never call any of my past disappointments "friendzoning", but they resonate with me as reasons to be miserable.

I'm now in a very happy relationship, but whenever I've been single I've been miserable, atrocious at Talking to Girls and prone to hopeless crushes on friends. Sometimes I've been terrified to tell them but managed, once she noticed and had to sit me down. Sometimes (when I was younger) I was an entitled prick about it, sometimes (as I've got older) I've tried not to be as unassuming as possible. Sometimes I've pretty much known what the answer would be and just wanted it confirmed to get it over with, sometimes I've only been 50-60% sure what was coming. Sometimes we've not continued the friendship and at least once due to me being an arse, sometimes we have a while later and I've really enjoyed not caring about my former broken heart. But every time I've been devastated when it happened, and increasingly so as I've perceived it as a pattern, increasingly terrified as I expected this more and more to be the entirety of my love-life. More to the point, I found it difficult to talk to anyone except a few people about my general lack of success with finding a partner, partly because I was embarrassed about it, partly because I was embarrassed about how much it pained me, and I still put off letting the internet read this for well over six months.

A lot's been written on Friendzoning (Tribbiani, 1994) and Nice Guy Syndrome (Cooper, 1973), either explaining the problems with the concepts and the sort of people who buy into them. Stavvers and RopesToInfinity both have neat explanations of the problems of sexual entitlement, reformed misogynist and shitehawk Hugo Schwyzer explains to Jezebel not only that, but why they should be ridiculed. Special mention to GirlOnTheNet and especially SlideRulesYou for sensitive explanations of how not to be a dick about it. Ally Fogg and The Good Men Project raise objections, but miss the point by simply focusing on the colossal mean-spiritedness and awful bastardism of the project. But Ally Fogg's second attempt and Laurie Penny's pleasantly sensitive and also fucking brilliant effort are probably the best explanations of the problem with the site. Penny points out that a lot of men on the blog, unlike the thoroughly bloody nice blokes who rant about superficial bitches or blithely assert that no can be a yes in disguise, "haven't actually said anything overtly sexist – they're just a bit overweight and ungroomed and feeling sorry for themselves". Sorry for themselves is key. Stavvers writes

If hearing a “no” is soul-crushing, or enraging, or likely to cause resentment, then you really need to work on your own issues before attempting to connect with other human beings in a non-coercive capacity.

My two major objections to Stavvers's post are these: Firstly, like an awful lot of criticisms, it talks about reaction to a one-off disappointment, when the complaint is far more often about a persistent string of repeat rejections. Secondly, it conflates soul-crushing with enraging, despair with resentment. While they're all extreme reactions, they're not the same. Being internally unhappy with yourself, to yourself is not immoral in the same way as externalising your resentment on other people or blaming them for failing to fulfil your demands. It's not the extremeness of the reaction that's the problem but the attitudes it reveals. And if you've never been genuinely terrified that nobody will ever want to fuck or even kiss you for the rest of your life, I'd be wary of limiting how upset a person can be by rejection or demanding soul-uncrushability from them.

My objection to this isn't just that it's mean and unfair though. Ally Fogg sees the problem as

There is a danger in labelling men like this as misogynists or creeps, and it is not just the emotional harm to the men themselves. As feminists will be the first to explain, our culture polices masculinity. Those who deviate from an assertive, even aggressive masculinity are shamed as wimps or with homophobic slurs. The shaming of the sexually reserved man is the converse of the shaming of the sexually assertive woman, both are defying the same norm.

While also this reminds me of the effeminacy implied by "creep" (see: any effete, cowardly villain in the entire history of film), I think a lot more is going on than just "the sexually reserved man", and I want to explain why we should tread very carefully when we decide, as Laurie Penny puts it,

How are we supposed to handle common-or-garden sexist dickwaddery when it puts photos on the internet and asks to be loved?

Collateral Splatter
There are already a lot of websites and tumblrs making fun of people on OK Cupid. Some publish creepy or nonsensical messages, some publish offensive or hypocritical profiles, some publish stupid pictures, some are grouped by theme, some aren't, some anonymise them, some don't. Nice Guys of OKCupid, despite some top-drawer gags, is part of this, and contributes to this. Yes, the men who claim women don't want them because they're Too Nice while saying awful, awful things, or wonder why they get friendzoned while being obnoxious and entitled are funny. But so are the men who claim women don't want them for being Too Nice while being really whiny and self-pitying. And the men who wonder why they get friendzoned while being fat, ugly or badly dressed. The joke works on several levels and we shouldn't be comfortable with all of them.

The overall joke on these blogs is basically two-pronged. You can laugh at the hypocritical misogyny, and you can laugh at the awful profiles, photos and appearances that they actually hoped would get them dates. I'm not convinced that laughing at the one rules out laughing at the other, or even that you can ever laugh at the two separately when they're shown, intermeshed, as one joke. I'm also not convinced that men who aren't thin, passably attractive, neurotypical and wholly content with their ability to talk to girls will see it purely as critique of misogyny, and not an attack on them. That's definitely how I personally felt it, and despite being stupidly happy with my life at the moment, I found it really upsetting. For all the protestations that it's solely a criticism of opinions, attitudes, words and entitlement, if you found yourself on that tumblr it would be equally easy, possibly more so, to feel mortified and embarrassed for your rubbish profile, or your weight, or your self-pity. Even if you'll never be on there because you're not on OKCupid, don't believe stupid shite and the site is down anyway, it's easy to imagine yourself on there, being ridiculed for your looks, social skills, emotional fragility or the risky choice of sharing your insecurities with friends or strangers. These aren't things people deserve to be humiliated for.

If you don't make sure you shame people for the right things, you risk shaming them for the wrong ones. An obvious example is this, from OKCupid Goldmine:

If your problem with casual homophobes is their ability to spell a notoriously difficult word, you're not only failing to take homophobia seriously, you're also being a prick to anyone with less education or more dyslexia than you. Not convinced? Look at this amateur eugenecist hypocrite from the same tumblr:

Being attacked for his own disability, in a weird case of Hypocrite Alien vs Hypocrite Predator.

The more nerd-specific Nice Guys and Fedoras of OKCupid aren't as blatant, but still do it. When Fedoras is challenged over the issue of people on the autistic spectrum, the writer is first dismissive (it's just about weird guys), then evasive (it's not about weird guys it's just about the stupid hat), with a Some Of My Best Friends Defence thrown in for good measure. On both tumblrs, the very first entry is a nerdy-looking fat guy:

In fact the first page of Nice Guys is at least 50% fat men. Two of them (one a bit chubby round the cheeks, the other just dressed a bit weird) seem to have done nothing beyond use the phrase 'nice guy' or 'friend zone' and one guy, a bit pudgy-looking and a lot miserable-looking, actively asserted they could still be friends, he'd just be in a bad mood for a while. These three are nowhere near the only examples, either.

Criticisms of "Nice Guys" often sail dangerously close to the wind in terms of depression and mental illness. This comment on Stavvers' blog opens

People who are affected so tremendously when their desire to have sex isn’t reciprocated have pretty deep emotional problems.

Not only does it see the problem as the level, rather than the nature and expression of emotional problems, quantitative rather than qualitative, it uses "emotional problems" in the same dismissive, false-concern way people use "you obviously have issues" and "get help".

The writer of the tumblr also specifically attacks one of them, not for anything implied by the word 'friendzone', but for the fact it makes his dating profile unappealing.

For the tumblr's fans as well, the issue with the misogyny on there is often that it justlooks bad ona dating profile, as if it'd basically be ok if they concealed or bottled up their issues instead of letting their potential fucks know in advance. Fans also seem to like the blog despite being aware that it's funny because they're ugly, or (of this guy) specifically because they are. While unsexy fat sadsacks who are probably autistic or crazy or something aren't the main point of these blogs, if a disproportionately large number are getting caught in the net, that's a bad sign and really not something to be dismissed.

Who Are These Poor Twats?
There's a sadsack/shitbag spectrum here, that goes from disappointedly falling for a friend to feigning friendship for sex and getting angry when it doesn't work, from wondering why women never want to sleep with you to demanding that they do. Given at least one fedora-topped nice guy actively rejected sex before marriage, even seeing this as a Nice quality, it's also unclear what, exactly, these blokes want from their friends, whether it's no-strings-attached sex, marriage, love, affection or I don't know what. Despite studiously evading the issue of physical appearance, which is an uncomfortable aspect of a blog that seems to be 50% fat dudes, RopesToInfinity probably has the best explanation of why Nice Guys aren't getting laid:

Physical attraction is not the be-all and end-all, but the nature of attraction is complex and nebulous, not a simple one-item checklist containing merely 'basic human decency', which you can fulfill and expect to be rewarded with endless, dizzying fuckfests with the partner of your choice. So, what else you got? Are you smart? Are you funny? Do you have an excellent beard? If your answer to all three is 'no', then you're going to need to consider what your qualities are that a woman might like, and put them front and centre. Or just grow a beard. Either way could work.

Nice Guy Syndrome is, in its way, the realisation of a sad truth about the world: that sexual attraction is basically amoral, and that the deciding factor in whether you get to have a vaguely satisfying love life isn't some universal moral imperative of being a decent person, it's morally neutral things like physical attractiveness, intelligence or confidence, or downright immoral and repugnant things like beards. Nice Guys are being forced to confront two distressing and confusing facts. Firstly, that the world is not as it should be and that regardless of your good heart and good deeds, sexual attraction is earned mainly by being sexually attractive. Secondly, that they're not.

It's understandable why the Friendzone thing might be more painful, confusing and frightening than getting acquaintance-zoned, or friend-of-a-friend-zoned, or twat-in-the-club-zoned. Whether your friendship is genuine or a cheat code to someone's knickers, whether the object of your affections is telling the truth, letting you down gently or lying to prevent a negative reaction, being told you're ok as a friend, and especialy if you're "nice", is a clear announcement that it's not your personality that's at fault. So it's understandable that, especially if this happens more than once, people may see it as a direct result of being sexually unattractive.

It's easy to see why the ideas of Friendzoning and the Nice Guy reinforce each other. Unless you're a LAD and into banter and choose the companions who can be most horrible to you, someone wanting your friendship seems like proof positive they think you're a nice person. And then, when you're trying to work out why people who think you're a nice person don't want to fuck you, it's easier to put two and two together, ignore the dozens of other numbers involved, make four and then cling to it for dear life.

Friend Zone
I've already written about the obvious point that grammar affects the implications of the word, and tracked some of the changes in meaning the word/idea has undergone. I've also heard a bloke use the verb (specifically for this episode of Life on Mars) to mean just the act of telling a friend you don't feel the same way about him. The word has obviously had a variety of uses, expressing a variety of different attitudes and ideas, most of them fairly dodgy. These include:

You meet and become friends with a woman. One day you realise you fancy her, she doesn't reciprocate.

You meet and become friends with a woman. You fancy her from day one. She doesn't reciprocate.

You meet a woman and befriend her because you fancy her. She doesn't reciprocate.

You meet a woman and pretend to befriend her because you fancy her. She doesn't reciprocate.

Women/people naturally see their friends less and less as potential partners as the friendship develops – so act fast if you want more than friendship.

Friendzoning is a thing that only happens to straight men.

Gay people and women also get friendzoned.

Being seen as just a friend is a failure on the part of the man for not making a move quick enough or at all.

Seeing a man as just a friend is a conscious decision on the part of the woman.

Seeing a man as just a friend is an unconscious reaction on the part of the woman.

Women have a deliberate agenda in friendzoning men. Fuck knows what but they do.

Women inadvertently exploit male friends/admirers by taking their friendship but not giving back in the form of sex/intimacy/love/etc.

Women deliberately exploit male friends/admirers by taking their friendship but not giving back in the form of sex/intimacy/love/etc.

The woman will see other men, this will be painful for the male friend/admirer.

The woman will complain about how other men treat her to the male friend/admirer, this will be even more painful.

The woman will never notice her male friend/admirer unless he grows a pair and does something.

The woman should notice her male friend/admirer.

The man never tells the woman how he feels.

The man tells the woman how he feels, and she doesn't feel the same way.

This is very painful for the man.

This is very painful for both the man and the woman.

This is very painful for the man and perversely pleasurable for the woman.

The friendship afterwards will be strained and awkward.

The friendship afterwards will be painful, as the man keeps seeing a woman he desires but knows he can't have.

The friendship afterwards will be too painful to maintain.

Without promise of sex, the friendship afterwards is not worth maintaining.

Without promise of sex, the friendship was never worth maintaining.

The friendship is ruined by the man's desire for the woman.

The friendship is ruined by the woman failing to return that desire.

The friendship is ruined because it was only ever a stepping-stone towards sex.

The friendship doesn't have to be ruined.

FML

I've seen all of these ideas implied or spelled out in relation to the friend zone/friendzoning/platonic crushes or whatever you want to call it. But never all of them at once, and this is important. For example, it's worth noting that even pick-up artists see this sort of situation as largely if not entirely the fault of the man for getting attached.

The Nice Guy
Now, I'm not a scientist, but there may be some confirmation bias at work which might make you ascribe negative qualities to the guy sleeping with the woman you love. Not sure what you'd call it. She might also avoid gushing to her unhappily single friends about her amazing, kind new boyfriend but be less hesitant to complain about his farting. But anyway, we all know what women prefer. Women prefer assorted hypermasculine stereotypes which tend to be riddled with class prejudice. These may include

Jocks

Jerks

Bastards

Douches

Bad boys

Assholes

Tattooed thugs

Muggers

Buggerers

Bushwhackers

Hornswogglers

Ass-kickers

Shit-kickers

Methodists

This idea tends to have its own set of myths and implications, again, often but not always a bit iffy.

Nice Guys are nice to everyone, but this doesn't make women desire them.

Nice Guys are nice to women, but this doesn't make women desire them.

Nice Guys are nice to the women they desire, but this doesn't make women desire them.

Nice Guys know how to make a woman feel special.

Nice Guys know what women want.

Nice Guys know what women want and do it with no hope of reward.

Nice Guys know what women want and do it in the hope of getting laid.

Women are attracted to jerks, bad boys and Mexican bandits because these men are more masculine.

Women are attracted to jerks, bad boys and Mexican bandits because these men are more exciting.

Women are attracted to jerks, bad boys and Mexican bandits because they don't know what's good for them.

Women are attracted to jerks, bad boys and Mexican bandits because they are evolutionarily scienced to seek out successful mates with like money and cool tattoos and gang guns and shit.

It is in the nature of the jerks, bad boys and Mexican bandits to inevitably be mean to her.

It is in the nature of the jerks, bad boys and Mexican bandits to inevitably cheat on her.

It is in the nature of the jerks, bad boys and Mexican bandits to inevitably abuse her.

The Nice Guy is expected to listen and be sympathetic while she complains about never finding a good man, even though one is right under her nose all along.

The Nice Guy is nothing but sympathetic that she can never find a good man, even though one is right under her nose all along.

The Nice Guy has no sympathy whatsoever that she can never find a good man, because one is right under her nose all along.

The Nice Guy has no sympathy whatsoever that jerks, bad boys and Mexican bandits are mean to her.

The Nice Guy has no sympathy whatsoever that jerks, bad boys and Mexican bandits cheat on her.

The Nice Guy has no sympathy whatsoever that jerks, bad boys and Mexican bandits abuse her.

Nice Guys are different.

Nice Guys are nice expecting nothing in return.

Nice Guys are nice expecting nothing in return and so deserve something back.

If you're consistently nice to a woman it's disappointing if she doesn't sleep with you.

If you're consistently nice to a woman she owes it to you to sleep with you.

Being Nice is a selfless act that all too often goes unrewarded.

Being Nice is a selfless act that deserves to be rewarded.

Being Nice is a strategy to acquire rewards.

Being Nice is a stupidly ineffective strategy to acquire rewards.

This wouldn't happen to me if I just behaved like a jerk/bad boy/Mexican bandit.

Maybe I should just start acting like a jerk/bad boy/Mexican bandit.

FINE THEN. I'll just become a jerk/bad boy/Mexican bandit.

Attract Women by Acting Like a Jerk/Bad Boy/Mexican Bandit, Theodor A. Peacock, $14.95, available in all good bookstores.

FML

The fact Nice Guys almost always seem to claim that they're too Nice, that being too Friendly gets you Friendzoned implies a very different gripe with womankind. What strikes me is that rather than expecting sex to pop out if you put in enough friendship tokens or kindness coins or whatever sarky currency you want to use, the Friendzoned Nice Guy seems to be the opposite: that friendship and kindness actively work against you. And it's less about making women who don't fancy you suddenly swoon, and more about not making yourself unattractive to women who otherwise might be interested. Much as this is problematic, and much as it acts as a very nasty catalyst when mixed with generally fucked-up attitudes to women, the martyred tone they often take seems to support this.

But, generally there are so many contradicting ideas attached to both Friendzoning and Nice Guys that one person can't believe in all of them. Extrapolating what specific misogyny a person is implying with these ideas is about as fruitful as guessing the postcode of someone's church from the fact they believe in God. But if I wanted a coherent catch-all definition, I'd go with this:When someone is only interested in you as a Friend and not a partner, this can be understood as a Zone, to be entered or placed in, and this happens to Guys, not in spite of their being Nice, but because of it.

LadytokensThis article has some very interesting analysis of why self-identifying "beta" males are often just as prone to straight-up misogyny as the "alphas".

Much of the humour (and the tragedy) in Peep Show stems from Mark's unshakable confidence in his own victimhood: he fails repeatedly to take responsibility for what befalls him, reasoning instead that the world has it in for men who eschew football and clubbing for comfortable sweaters, canal boating and nights on the sofa with Das Boot. This works itself up into an odd superiority complex which pivots on a paradox by which society's stereotypical alpha males are simultaneously resented because of their apparent desirability and (smugly) pitied for their supposed shallowness. In Bain and Armstrong's representation of the beta male worldview, the terms and conditions of class conflict are transposed onto the male civil war in which the Corrigans are the – hopeless – proles.

Despite his small-c conservatism in 'real' politics, Mark is borderline Maoist when it comes to the internecine rivalry of men, something that becomes particularly clear on the rare occasions that his clumsy romantic advances are reciprocated. Being in a relationship isn't, to him, its own reward, but an indication of a drastic redistribution of sexual capital which avenges him on those – especially Jeff, his alpha arch-enemy – he believes have 'oppressed' him. Women are treated as nothing more than symbols of advantage in a battle men fight between themselves.

Of course, the whole bollocks about alpha and beta males is increasingly believed to be bollocks when applied to dogs, let alone humans. Moreover, even in the old-fashioned view of how wolf packs work, 'alpha' is not a type or a community but a social position within a group, to be won or lost. It's not that surprising then if men squabble to be top dog in a group that sees itself as by, for and of the betas. To be so beta, they outbeta the betas, to win at losering and underdog their way to the top. It's also not surprising that women end up being the currency. Men demonstrate their status over other men by acquiring more hotter women, and expect that status to earn them more hotter women. Women are both the prize and the scoring system.

Another look at the rogue's gallery of douches, jerks and other jammy fuckers shows, basically, a list of archetypal Alpha Males, selfishly hogging all the women and then not even treating them right like Nice Betas would. The Nice Guy whine isn't really to do with Niceness but with status and masculinity. They reject the proudly "alpha" jock or lad who probably used to take their dinner money and flush their heads down toilets. They deliberately style themselves as "betas", hence the nerd paraphernalia all over both Nice Guys and Fedoras. But bloody hell do they want to exercise dominance of other men by acquiring women.

Nice Guys are anxious not just because they're not getting lucky, but because they don't perform heterosexual masculinity correctly. I'm not going to romanticise them as noble, self-sacrificing rebels against patriarchy, because half the time they've done nothing more than tried and failed. Even by rejecting or failing at dominant, aggressive male sexuality, they still aspire to it, kicking themselves for being too Nice, too beta and submissive. They fantasise about becoming the bad boy who steals their rightful girlfriends, acting like heartless lotharios, peacocking and learning pick-up, basically becoming either the Alpha Geek or just a standard Alpha. They believe in and reinforce the same old dominant male roles, but they do it by worrying and feeling shite about themselves because they don't know how to do them.

Sexy, Sexy Morals
This is why I think we need to be very careful about how we tackle these attitudes. What distinguished Nice Guys of OKCupid from all the other Amusing Nerds of Internet Dating sites out there is that, at the same time as embarrassing unattractive people for their dating profiles, it had a legitimate political purpose. The myths involving Nice Guys and Friendzoning need challenging, people who hold women in contempt for not fancying them deserve criticism, and the hypocrisy of thinking you're so nice that women should have to fuck you is really funny and everyone should get a chance to enjoy laughing at it. The problem is, criticising men for very real moral failings needs to be neatly and clearly separated from laughing at their dating skills.

While it's true that patriarchy hurts men too, it doesn't hurt us willy-nilly, for shits and giggles. Patriarchy's not a fucking idiot. It hurts men who fail to do their patriarchal duty – basically, patriarchy hurts men if they don't do enough to hurt women. Radtransfem has a very good explanation of "compulsory sexuality":

‘Compulsory sexuality’ refers to a set of social attitudes, institutions and practices which hold and enforce the belief that everyone should have or want to have frequent sex (of a socially approved kind).[…]Put more simply, this all means: in the eyes of patriarchy, “men gotta fuck women”. If you are a woman not being fucked by a man, you are doing ‘woman’ wrong, and if you are a man who is not fucking women, you are doing ‘man’ wrong. (The consequences of doing ‘woman’ wrong are, of course, significantly more punitive than doing ‘man’ wrong, because women are always closer to consequences under patriarchy.)

I'd agree that the consequences of doing 'man' wrong may be less punitive for men, but since for straight dudes, compulsory sexuality often means compulsory being-a-dick-to-women, women are also closer to these punitive consequences, because men get penalised if they don't help penalise women. Society attaches a moral imperative to being sexual, and to being good at being sexual, and it's shitty for everyone especially the further away you go from being a Proper Straight White Man.

It's not just UniLad who treat "gash" as the sole incentive for doing anything, even in fashion columns (this really happened). For as long as I can remember being aware of Things Women Want, morality and sexual success have been mashed together. I learned, constantly, as a telly-viewing teenager in the late 1990s that women now preferred the Sensitive New Man who cooked, was sensitive, understood about feminism and was sensitive (the way Ladette culture shaped my shittiest views on gender and What Women Really Want is a whole other rant). My parents told me not to eat so many kitkats in case I got fat and girls didn't like me. Positive qualities were mature, masculine, attractive to women, who'd want a man, not a boy. It's no surprise Nice Guys think being nice is enough to get them sex, because society constantly dangles women as a carrot, or withdraws them as a stick, bribing men into moral behaviour with only slightly more subtlety than a Lynx advert. At the same time, your worth as a man, and therefore as a human being, is measured to a stupid extent by sex.

Obviously not everyone tots up conquests and multiplies by average rating out of ten. But men congratulate each other for sex. More to the point, men make fun of virgins (declared LAD practice), joke about how long it is since you had any, list ludicrously easy situations where you couldn't score. Our favourite cuss at school was "You're so desperate that", followed by an elaborate wanking technique (In hindsight, we'd probably either tried this the night before or were planning for next time our parents went out). Losing your virginity is a rite of passage, that you have to pass before a certain age. Being a virgin at university, 21 or 40 are things to be embarrassed about, and we're also expected to reach certain levels of maturity according to chronological age, not life experience (and insistence on "maturity" isn't always far from grr-manly-man-mustash homophobia). Men scare each other with loss of gash if we don't do masculine heterosexuality properly, downgrading each other's heterosexual masculinity if we fail to acquire enough gash. Straight-dude identity conflates sexual conquest, maturity, correct gender performance and moral imperatives. It's a shite state of affairs, and we do it all the time. We even use 'friendzoning' as a slur on other men's masculinity, and it gets weird as fuck

Then puberty hit and, if we were straight, we actively wanted the company of girls. We wanted to “go with” them, date them, and eventually we wanted to fall in love and live with one, maybe for the rest of our lives. That’s the way heterosexual boys are supposed to mature, unless they become monks.

It depends on the "manchild" stereotype – a boy who has just got older and bigger instead of being properly socialised into normative masculinity. It even has a neatly bullet-pointed list explaining what "manliness" is, framing traditionally masculine qualities like strength, self-confidence and social skills – luxuries not everyone has – as moral imperatives, while treating basic acts of human decency like not being an obnoxious shitbucket towards women as important because they're masculine. There's already an idea floating round, probably with the best of intentions, that sexism is unmanly, and this is a bizarre and stupid thing to play into, because sexism is very manly, and this is the problem with manliness. When men talk to men about not being dicks, not only do our own prejudices and urges to assert masculinity competitively come into play, we often try to catch flies with Old Spice instead of vinegar by offering things misogynists will aspire to.

This is especially true when it comes to Nice Guys. We start off with a story about how we used to be shy and awkward and sexually frustrated just like them, but we're not any more. More often than not we've found ourselves a wonderful wife/girlfriend/polyamorous lifestyle which we may or may not mention (see above). We try to win them over with helpful dating advice. We point out that not only is shitty behaviour shitty, but that it's actually not even sexy. We ramble inexplicably about smurfs, tell them to get proper female friends, then conclude:

People, men and women both, are complex, emotional creatures, and virtually all of them are horny. If you’re honest with yourself and honest with them you will form trusting, open connections with a large network of humans. Those people are called friends. You will be in many friend zones. You will be a better person. Someone will fuck you. Trust me.

Here’s the hard truth, Friendzone. You’re not a nice guy. You are a gutless, pathetic, sad, horny little worm who’s too afraid of rejection to just tell a woman how you really feel. Your anger when she doesn’t psychically glean your unspoken desires and automatically reciprocate them is actually just you externalizing the disgust you feel for your own cowardice.

The things I've stuck in italics are all things Real Men don't do. Real Men face the truth. Real Men are brave, admirable, successful and sexually fulfilled. They're not afraid of anything, least of all rejection. Real Men say how they feel, especially when it comes to being forward with women. They stay calm and take responsibility for their problems, and Real Men have inner confidence in themselves and their courage.

Fact is, it's ok to be gutless, pathetic, sad and horny. It's ok to be absolutely petrified of rejection and bottle up your desires and there's nothing wrong with feelings of self-disgust at your own cowardice. Arse though this imaginary "Friendzone" bloke probably is, and brilliant as Real Men sound by comparison, this criticism of Nice Guys is explicitly phrased in terms of masculinity. Getting angry with people for not working out you want to sleep with them and then letting you, that's a dick move, but I really don't get the impression this was high on Smurfbro's list of priorities. If you're still not sure, do you really want to hop into a boat with Hugo Schwyzer for the great debate on How Should We Do Masculinity Properly?

Desperate Archetypes
To an alien or someone, the way the Nice Guys and Fedoras tumblrs treated each other as allies on the same battlefield would seem bizarre. There's postsexplaining it. What do stupid hats and frustrated sexual entitlement even have in common? Yet, it makes sense even to me. It resonates. They fit in with some kind of archetypal nerd, who, as well as steampunk and glasses and gaming and scifi/fantasy and getting bullied at school, also has a tendency towards burning, embittered misogyny and the kind of old-fashioned classic manliness hat that old-fashioned classic manliness men like Don Draper wear.

This character is desperate. He might be desperate for sex, or for an intimate relationship, or for the manly status and confidence of having a woman, or for female company, or for any company. He might be deceiving himself that he's desperate for one of those things when in fact he's desperate for all of them. He probably feels entitled and hard done by and he probably feels sad and frightened. As well as a male version of the mad-spinster-cat-lady, he's also the passive-aggressive counterpart to the aggressive desperate man. The ripped musclejock or balding divorcee, who tries it on with every woman in the room, who posts photos of his penis on Craigslist or sits silently on chatroulette, astonishingly glum for a man who's currently masturbating.

Desperation plus privilege is a nasty combination. Not only do desperate people do desperate things to escape their desperation, if they have any kind of a sense of entitlement, it's just amplified by the feeling that not getting what they want is ruining their lives. Conversely though, they're fucking funny. The seething, hypocritical resentment of the Nice Guys of OKCupid. The picture of Luke Bozier where it's quite clearly not nine inches. The sheer tragicomic sadness. And the nervous, comrade-shot-right-next to me laugh, because there, but for half a shred more confidence and marginally better gender politics, go I.

Of course, no real people actually fit these stereotypes perfectly. But we're fucking terrified of them. When I was unhappily single, I was terrified of becoming one of these lonely bachelors. Given the centrality of monogamous, sexual relationships to how society fits together, your ability to find sex actually does risk your prospects of long-term companionship, of raising children, and of having company in old age. Possibly one of my worst moments was realising that, if I was going to end up permanently alone, I might not be able to properly look after a dog. Dogs mean a lot to me, dogs almost always cheer me up, and before this, I'd thought "at least maybe one day I'll have a dog", so you can imagine how much this scared me. I was terrified of growing up to be a lonely middle-aged man and then a retired bachelor. I was desperate to find a girlfriend or even just get laid, so as to avoid becoming that guy who's desperate to find a girlfriend or even just get laid. This wasn't just because they seem so bloody miserable, or because they can come across as awful people, or even because desperation is unattractive to women and I was desperate to be attractive to women. It's also because there's stigma attached to unhappily single people, and the older and more unsatisfied they are, the more we ridicule them. Yep. Someone, somewhere decided to attach social stigma to loneliness, and probably never even got disembowelled for it. When Luke Bozier got hacked, we actually headlined laughing at his dick, as if exaggerating your length on Craigslist is morally worse than being into jailbait and more embarrassing than being a Blairite defector to the Tory party and starting Menshn.

Precision
The Bozier's Cock Incident is why it's important to know exactly what we want to criticise Nice Guys for and, more importantly, not go for any of the other things ever. Sexual desperation can be a red flag for women, and you're not only within your rights to avoid people whose frustration and neediness might make them dangerous, you're probably also quite sensible. But treating desperation as if it leads directly to abusiveness has some nasty implications – that misogyny and sexual violence come from unfulfilled male urges. And as Ally Fogg points out, the unhappiness itself is not a problem. Desperation breeds desperation, and making people feel uncomfortable, embarrassed or especially morally wrong for it only speeds up the process. If I'd been single when those fictitious nine inches came to light, I'd probably have laughed even harder and even more hypocritically than I'm doing now. I'd then have been even more desperate to stop being single in sheer terror of becoming another Bozier.

The best example of doing this wrong is the twitter @reddit_txt. It's mostly examples of painfully fuckawful racist and sexist quotes from a notoriously racist and sexist website-community-thingy that really, really deserve to be laughed at. Mostly. It also posts tweets like this:

one night I filled that water bottle with JELLO, and proceeded to masturbate in it.

The joke here isn't fuckawful opinions. It's tragic, virginal, sexual frustration. It associates their unmanly sexual frustration with their dick behaviour, both as cause (because misogyny and sexual violence are caused by unfulfilled male urges) and just punishment (because sex with girls is life's reward for good behaviour). Instead of being lauded for their inventive ways of masturbating, they're stigmatised for it.

Sometimes laughing at the stereotype explicitly buys into the idea that this boy-man hat-nerd not only got bullied at school, but deserves to be as punishment:

um, how can someone be a man CHILD?? men are children who grew up!! i think you don't unders-- hey give me back my fedora guys stop it hey

Wholly useful and justified criticisms of Nice Guys who are entitled or angry at women for not fucking them also get used against men who are just plain unhappy:

Notice how the most offensive thing Peter says about the situation is "don't you just hate it" and ":p". The lecture he gets from this Dan Sabato bloke, however, accuses him of "faulting" the woman and calling upon her to justify herself, neither of which are implied by the original post. Even though he's only done this, he gets treated as if he's done this. This fairly popular tweet attacks men not for anger, or aggression, or any outward-focused emotions, but for frustration:

Are you a "Nice Guy" frustrated with women bc they wont have sex with you? Tip: Fuck you. The world doesnt owe you shit and you're not nice.

Now, fair enough, there may have been a long exchange in between when Peter said some really obnoxious, misogynistic stuff. The ambiguous "frustration with women" could mean general frustration because of your situation with women, or frustration at women for causing it. But the tweet doesn't specify or even distinguish the two, while the tumblr that posted the exchange between Peter and Dan Sabato clearly feels no need to post anything else they may have said, and that just hating the situation is in itself misogynistic.

Precision matters, and as soon as you start critiquing, belittling or ridiculing entire individuals rather than specific attitudes, tropes or behaviours, you start conflating things. Be as angry as you want at men who see women as obliged to fuck them, whether they're happily getting laid or not. But aim precisely. For a start, misogynists don't deserve to be belittled and attacked for being unhappy any more than homophobes deserve to be ridiculed for their spelling. There's a difference between feeling hopeful then disappointed and feeling entitled then hard done by, between self-pity and resentment, between furiously kicking yourself and furiously kicking others, between finding things soul-destroying and enraging. A lot of those are unattractive qualities, a lot get really annoying, and a lot are pretty damaging for the person feeling them. But there's also a difference between unattractively annoying and deserving of public ridicule.

Attacking, and especially morally condemning self-declared Nice Guys and Friendzone Victims for the wrong thing is damaging in several ways. Leaving aside fatness, unattractiveness, and poor social skills, unhappiness is just a mean thing to attack someone for unless there's actually something nasty in it. Secondly, it announces loud and clear to people who aren't pricks that the mere fact of being unhappily single makes you a bad person. Now, while you might not be that worried about "alienating allies", this isolates them from people with good gender politics, making it hard for them to discuss anything related to their sex-life sensibly and removing a space to understand their problems that isn't fucking Reddit. Thirdly, it creates the wrong impression in the person supposedly needing to be set straight. If someone is attacked for being fat, awkward or unattractive they're right to conclude there's actually nothing they can do to right themselves – unless the point of the tumblrs was actually just to get nerds down the gym. If they're attacked for wearing a stupid hat, they can just chuck it out and they're off the hook. But if you shame someone morally for their depression or for the source of it, which a lot of these sources directly do and Nice Guys of OKCupid seems unable or unwilling to avoid, you make it very clear that the root cause to be addressed is not misogyny, but being a single beta loser. It risks prioritising masculinity and getting laid over not being a prick, which is sort of the opposite of what we want.

If you feel criticisms of both Nice Guys and aggressive masculine sexuality need to be made (and you're probably right) you need to separate these from stigmatising rejection, wanking, crying and crywanking over rejection, if you don't want to reinforce the get-laid-at-all-costs culture that's all over straight masculinity. This is especially true if you plan on using the argument "What's so important about sex haven't these people heard of wanking?" later on, just because demanding people make do with something that you yourself are stigmatising is unfair, spiteful and downright silly.

Finally, these are socially damaging reasons to be attacking people. Unattractiveness, awkwardness, unhappiness and frustration, poor mental health, low self-confidence or not getting enough proper sex with girls aren't moral failings in themselves, but criticising people for these things arguably is. While you may not feel guilty for mocking affluent white dudes' depression, fatness or autism, that kind of shit will splatter other people. Where criticisms of desperate men hinge on ideas of masculinity – especially demanding forwardness with women and a thick skin when it comes to rejection – when they offer improved chances of sex with women as an incentive, and when men assert feminist credentials as an alpha male quality, attacks on Nice Guys reinforce not only the same ideas that make them miserable for not having a woman, but also the same ones that make them feel entitled to one in the first place.

Personal Anecdotes
So another of my low points, (skip the personal anecdotes if you want) a few days before my previous/first relationship ended, was when I found out second-hand that a girl I really fancied had started sleeping with this bloke. I was happy, in a loving and (I was pretty sure at that moment) stable relationship, so in theory I had no reason to be upset. In practice I was devastated. Thing was, this bloke was really, really good at the whole flippant dudebro heterosexual lad act thing. I wasn't. But most of the time, I didn't actually give a fuck anyway. Keep your banter sports mate, I'm fine making stuffed peppers and laughing at a puppy. Along with the standard kick of jealousy though, I got a bitter reminder, not just that I didn't know how to do heterosexual masculinity right, but that not bothering with that pointless bollocks wasn't an option, that performing straight dudebro gender, however stupidly or nastily, might actually be an important factor in whether or not happy things work out for you.

Exactly a year to the day – and I'm not even joking – I was in the pub, after a demonstration, with a large group of acquaintances and overheard something I didn't want to from a small group of fairly new friends. I was new to London and didn't have many other friends there, and these were also people I expected would have faixrly good politics. Anyway, someone I'd fancied quite a lot from that group, and who hadn't been looking for a relationship when I'd asked her out, had started seeing someone and they were all congratulating her on getting laid and so on. I didn't take this well. But I also didn't say anything, because I thought it was her body and her life and none of my business. I just sat trying to overhear as few snippets as I could, scowling into my pint and feeling shit about myself for an hour or two, made my way slowly home, shut my bedroom door, hung my coat up, somehow managed to pull off a button in doing so, looked at the button, burst into tears and proceded to feel fucking awful for the next few weeks. I'd pretty much assumed nobody had noticed at the time. In fact I was slightly hamming up the miserable-looking in the hope one of my new friends would notice and ask me if I was ok. Then, a week or so later, it turned out they had, and were pretty annoyed with me for all the quiet scowling. If this had been idiots or LADs or common-or-garden dudebros I wouldn't have been so affected I don't think. But people with decent politics, especially what I saw as a better grasp of gender politics than mine, is different. Them holding it against me that, after a lifetime of low self-confidence and an especially rough twelve months, I didn't have much in the way of emotional resilience, that fucked me up. I couldn't blame them for taking sides with their friend over me, but it left me wishing I had a group of friends who'd unconditionally side with me, and I remember suddenly seeing the appeal of a social circle of dudebros who'd automatically side with me for being a man.

Then a couple of years later, after I started writing this but before I finished, I was watching How I Met Your Mother, because someone in the room had put How I Met Your Mother on and I was in the room. Barney, the super-cool awesome callous with women philanderer cool suit guy that all the dudes who watch How I Met Your Mother are meant to admire or something got an origins story. He was a hippy with long hair and a beard who worked in a café and told people off for objectifying women. Then his girlfriend left him for the fancy tie-wearing businessman who had objectified her or something. Barney was all sad, found a leaflet and put a suit on like in Star Wars and now he's the amoral throbber we all know and love. This for some reason affected me. It was my worst-case scenario for a lot of the time I was unhappily single. I didn't want to end up with the dilemma between having actual fucking principles or being vaguely happy with my life. More to the point, I didn't want to end up with the dilemma of either having actual fucking principles or being able to tell my friends I was unhappy.

Conclusion
The problem with the Friendzone and its Nice Guys is not just a sense of entitlement but a sense of obligation. Hurting people for what they and society at large perceive as unmanly "beta" qualities is dangerous. It reinforces norms of male heterosexuality by making failure at them painful and embarrassing. It not only pushes people into desperation but increases a sense of male entitlement by implying the failure to be manly is what's stopping them from getting laid. And complaining about the Friendzone or how women don't like Nice Guys and can't read your mind is a "beta" quality. Real Men ask out any girl that takes their eye, take rejection in their stride and move onto the next. If something hurts, they don't whine nasally, they bottle it up or at least express it in a gruff heterosexual grumble.

We have to actively avoid even accidental slurs on Nice Guys' masculinity, not because it's mean or because it needs to be protected, but because it sets up masculinity as something they're expected to achieve. And these are especially shitty forms of masculinity. Nobody is entitled to sex, or love, or marriage, or affection, or even company. But I'm not convinced that's the only thing they want. They also want the basic feelings of self-worth and validity as a human being that we withhold from people who don't get their bits wet. Everybody is entitled to that, and we should be giving them it regardless of how much they get lucky and how happy they are about it, and only taking it away for being a dick, not a pussy.

If we're going to argue that some reactions to repeat or one-off rejection are ok - like being sad or frustrated with yourself - and some are unacceptable - like being angry or resentful, it's important to be consistent. If you wouldn't outright say "it's bad that Eric Pickles is so fat", try to avoid jokes about Eric Pickles being fat, and if you would, don't pretend you don't have it in for fat people. Similarly, if you genuinely think it's morally objectionable to be unattractive, desperate or sad about rejection, fine, I won't much like or trust you but you go ahead and think what you want. If you wouldn't say outright "it's wrong to be a frustrated nerd in a bad hat", try to avoid letting your comedy picture-blog imply that. If you want to attack obnoxious straight-bro sexuality - which we should - we need to stop making failure to achieve it any more uncomfortable than it already is, and if we want to attack passive-aggressive straight-nerd entitlement - which we also should - we need to stop making the basic universal human decency they really are entitled to depend on proving their attractiveness by acquiring women. It's both unfair and stupid to attack a sense of entitlement to something if we insist on enforcing the obligation to do it, and its both unfair and stupid to insist people improve their gender politics if we make good gender politics involve magically snapping out of unhappiness. Plus if you're going to be ridiculed as a misogynist for your stupid hat anyway, what have you got to lose by learning pick-up?